Week 6 at Jamu Spa School | Scrubs, scrubs, scrubs!

Bit of a late post this one. For the past few days I’ve been focusing on study for the exam, it’s already next Saturday! I’m feeling a lot more positive lately, maybe because it’s nearing exciting events i.e. (a) finally finishing the diploma and (b) getting to go home. I know as much as I feel like I’m ready to leave Bali, there are things I’m going to miss. But more on that later! Week 6 was all about scrubs!

Learning stone therapy wasn’t that fun and I quite disliked it so I was looking forward to doing scrubs. I only had about three days of lessons where I learned about the different balinese scrubs as well as wraps. Me being me who loves to smell everything over and over again, was enjoying this part of my course. The powders were laid out in containers and the raw ingredients on a tray – cinnamon, turmeric, coconut, ground coffee, cocoa, babakan, rice powder, temu giring, and more! I had modelled for a student who did the body scrub course a couple of weeks back so I knew how it felt to get a body scrub treatment. I just didn’t understand who’d pay for a body scrub when you could apply it yourself! Well actually, the student I modelled for just wasn’t a good therapist. A body scrub is a treatment, not just a wack-on exfoliation of a supermarket scrub. The problem was she had no massage skills so the body scrub was applied just as if anyone would wipe and rub some exfoliator on your skin. But combined with massage skills (even though it’s not technically a massage treatment), getting a body scrub can be a relaxing, pampering and cleansing experience.

I wanted to eat everything! Jamu Spa School houses 4 different scrubs:

Jasmine lulur – rice powder, turmeric powder, tamarind seed

Coconut mangir – rice powder, mangir, tamarind, coconut

Vanilla coffee – ground coffee, cocoa, vanilla

Kemiri / candle nut

Did I mention body wraps are also part of the treatment? It’s basically a body mask after doing the scrub. I got to try three different ones at Jamu

Volcanic mud

Earth and Flower clay mask

Boreh

Papaya, mint, kemiri

I LOVE kemiri nut. It smells amazing. It’s closely related to the macadamia nut and reminds me a shea nut with it’s highly moisturising properties. It’s actually 50% natural oil which is why it burns like a candle. Actually it’s almost waxy like a candle. Anywho besides kemiri, coconut mangir is my fav scrub and I like applying the clay mask and boreh mask. Going back to ‘why would you pay someone for a body scrub treatment?’- I’ve learned it’s quite different to your usual store-bought exfoliator. I always used apricot scrub at home so I’m used to a creamy white paste that has lots of granules in it. A body scrub treatment on the other hand uses natural ingredients (in bali anyway) and it’s massaged into the skin until it falls off. The scrub dries as you massage it and it turns into dry flaky rolls along with dead skin cells. I like that I can actually see the flakes whereas with an exfoliator it’s almost just like a face wash that you rinse off. I feel like I have to scrub at my skin to make sure dead skin cells are removed.

Anywho I enjoy the treatment. Application takes 30 mins for the scrub, followed by 10 min application of the mask after which I wrap the client and give them a 20min face/scalp massage while it dries. I love the variety of the treatment in that I’m doing three different things in an hour compared to a straight 60 min body massage. It makes time go by more interestingly haha. I also find that I quite like giving face/head massages and I want to learn more techniques so that’ll be another thing to look into when I’m back.

What else happened this week?

oh Galungan – another Balinese ‘public holiday’ where business still runs as usual. Don’t ask me what the holiday is, I just know Bali has a lot of ceremonies and public holidays. School was off this day as well but I had a little fun the day before. We have a huge mango tree at the front of the school and you can climb to the roof to reach for mangoes. A few of the lady staff and I spent 10-15mins or so after lunch out on the roof wacking mangoes down with a plastic stick – there were so many! They were all excited and jittery about it though because they could use them for their ceremony back at their villages for Galungan. They wanted to make green mango salad too but it never happened. I took a couple of mangoes home for myself.

Oh, and graduation happened. Another ceremony and group photos… yip yip.

All girls this week

I didn’t do much else. Chilled at home, studied, went for walks, read, studied German, still waiting for my foot to heal so I can swim already!!